Thank you. A question...what percent of population has died from Covid?...and how does that compare to freer states/provinces?
Let’s compare to the United States - the US has about 13 times Australia’s population (328 million versus 25 million).
According to what I find on the internet (and I’m not going to check this in detail unless somebody seriously tells me its wrong), the official death tool from COVID in the US is about 679,000 people.
1/13th of that number is 52,000 more or less. In other words is Australia’s death rate was the same as that of the United States, we’d have lost 52,000 people at this point.
The actual number is currently 1,178 - America per capita has lost 44 times more people than Australia.
To answer your question - about 0.005% of Australians have died of COVID versus about 0.2% of Americans.
Predicting what the numbers would have been if things had been done differently is always, in part, a guessing game. But I honestly don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that what has been done in Australia has saved a lot of lives from COVID.
I think we needed to do some of it. But I don’t believe they needed to do anywhere near all of it.
Comparisons within Australia - it’s complicated because part of the reason Victoria and NSW have the most restrictions is that they have had by far the biggest outbreaks. But I don’t think anybody could sensibly argue the outbreaks were caused by the restrictions. In the case of Victoria our worst outbreak happened because of a single known failure in hotel quarantine - we know that. In NSW, their government had very low restrictions in place before their outbreak and tried very hard not to introduce restrictions before finally reaching what I do regard as a panicked stage - but they did try to avoid it to begin with.